Welcome to the Sideways festival

The backbone of the Sideways festival is a 4 week expedition through Belgium, from West to East, between August 17th and September 17th 2012. During the 5 festival weekends, the mobile laboratory takes a halt at 5 festival locations: Menen (19.8), Herzele (25-26.8), Brussels (1-2.9), Turnhout (8-9.9) and Zutendaal (15-16.9). Here, the different artistic trails are entwined into a knot of activity. These 5 festival locations host the actual festival programme: a series of performances, talks & walks, live art, site-specific interventions and walkshops!

A donkey carrying a set of multimedia devices. An artist painting while walking. Discovering edible plants along slow paths. These are just a few of more than 30 artistic projects to experience at the Sideways festival, an interdisciplinary art festival 'in the open' and 'on the go'. An initiative interconnecting ecology and culture.

Sideways sets out to explore a series of sidetracks. Fairly removed from Belgium's metropolitan arts centres and academic strongholds, it opens an artistic research on the cultural meanings of being on the road. Not as a driver or passenger, but on foot. Sideways takes as a starting point what in Belgium has become called 'slow ways' or 'slow paths': a meshwork of footpaths, alleys, tracks, backroads and 'desire lines' to be discovered by artists and audiences in the margin of the ubiquitous car infrastructure.

Far more than a connection to move from point A to point B, a trail is tantamount to a movement, an act of crossing, the performance of the passage. Sideways postulates no destinations; only variations of stillness and movement. Art on site, but occurring along lines (of movement) rather than situated at specific locations. Step by step, the expedition unfolds: passing by, with detours, fortuitously, pretty much sideways.